Thanksgiving Countdown

As I write this The gathering at the Elder Dunn's homestead with the Williams clan is about 13 hours away (12 from when I posted)

Our contributions are 3 pies, a plate (or two) of cookies and a cranberry mold.

Bill has made (and I may get him to write about it later) a blueberry pie and is getting ready to finish making his favorite Chocolate Ribbon Pie.

I made a pumpkin pie. I have been experimenting with recipes for a few years now. The most disastrous one was the year I used the recipe from my mother-in-laws Joy of Cooking. It never set up. I followed the directions, I cooked an extra 30 minutes when it wasn’t set when the described time came ans went. It was still pumpkin soup. I even tried to bake it longer once we got there. It was still pumpkin soup .

This year we have a Bittman (How to Cook Everything By Mark Bittman). I had good success with a quiche of his so I tried his this year. He has a good trick of cooking the filling while you pre-bake the crust to give it a bit of a kick start.  As usual I had some left over filling after filling the crust. So I fill little ramekins with it. I have now eaten one of the Ramekins. It set up well. It was tasty but a bit on the under seasoned side. The texture is good not too smooth but not grainy. Holly helped make it. She won’t eat it unless I can convince her that it will won’t hurt her newly braces filled mouth and she is hungry enough.

The cranberry mold came because I was sad to discover that my guilty pleasure of the nice jellied cranberry sauce (you know the one that comes out in the shape of the can) is full of high fructose corn-syrup. As I am trying to avoid that I thought I would make some sort of cranberry mold. I found a recipe at Williams-Sonoma. I enjoyed making it. It talks about cooking the mixture until the sauce thicken and the cranberries burst. Well they pop and can do so loudly. I didn’t follow the directions as well as I should and to try ad make up for my mistakes I added a second packet of Knox Gelatin. I hope it turns out well. I used my Tupperware jello mold as I don’t use it that often.


Now for the cookies. Griffin has been asking me to make “people” cookies with him for several weeks. After much discussion we determined that he meant gingerbread cookies. He decided that he wanted to bring them for Thanksgiving so I threw in the idea to make turkey shaped ones.
Now I looked at all the recipes that I have and got the general ingredients. I have used many times a recipe I tore out of a magazine many years ago. It was sitting on the table as I was getting ready to make the cookies and I grabbed it only to see one of our children’s cookbooks with a picture of a gingerbread man poking out of a stack of paper. I have used ‘The Children’s Step-By-Step Cook Book’ by Angela Wilkes cooking with kids many times. No only my own kids. Kids like the pictures to follow as well as the really nice photos of the ingredients at the start of every recipe. Knowing that Griffin would be “helping” I opted to use this version although I substituted molasses for the honey or golden syrup it called for as I didn’t have either in the house. After sending Bill out twice once for more cookie sheets and another time for currents. We got the cookies  made.

We even made one armless and one with a light saber.  We tried them and they taste really good!


Have a Happy Thanksgiving!